Jerry Thompson's Truth and Photography : Notes on Looking and Photographing is a poetic and thoughtful look at the nature photography from the perspective of someone shoots and write, and who studied under Walker Evans. Thompson's critical foundation is unusual in photography in that it doesn't stem from the usual heavy hitting theorists that have supported, dominated and restricted the act of looking at this strange form of imagemaking. He calls mostly upon other photographers to account for themselves, and then he calls upon a deep sense of empathy powered by imagination to expand and generalise upon the photographer's own commentary. It is a hermenuetic approach coloured by a desire to instill a broad poetry to process of photography and to the life dedicated to creating these images.

His exploitation of external information grants him opportunity to ask questions well beyond the frame of the image yet undoubtably attached to it. A Stieglitz image becomes a deep formalist reading which drifts into a meditation upon the life of an aging photographer, and analysis of a Walker Evans image is driven by the lofty literary aspirations, ascerbic humour and ambitions of the artist. The ability to understand in a very subtle way that photography is a practice which produces images and not a form of imagery gives Thompson a rare distinction. His understanding of the immediate physical and mental world that surrounds an image opens the imagery into a poetic realm which functions as a critical context.

All photographs open a small space and time which is heterogenous and frozen. A photograph is deep-linked to the reality from which it came, but is still only a representation of it. Under Thompson's imaginative reading the space broadens and embraces the lives of the photographers shown, and each image becomes a form of portrait.

The role of imagination in photography isn't dicussed frequently. There are artists who create tableauxs, for example Joel Peter Witkin, but it seems that the photographs may require the imagination of the creator but don't require as much imagination from the viewer. Even here, photographs describe a reality. A staged reality of fleshy freaks, scratched negatives and death-and-sex icons, but still all quite real, overly visceral, and leaving little to the imagination... This book opens up empathy as a method and a way to see and draws the reader and viewer into body and mind of the artists he examines.

Early on in his Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images Terry Barrett admits that he isn't a photographer (at least not in the sense of the people that he writes about). He is primarily an educator of art educators, and because of that his focus is on clarity and direct communication. One unfortunate early failure in communication is the title. The title suggests a way of examinging photographs - which it undoubtably does - but does it all under the rubric of writing about photographs. The book title, I suspect, tries to appeal to a broader audience than the manuscript would suggest. It is not, however, a damning criticism as the book is really quite useful for understanding how to think about looking at photographs - but from the perspective of a writer, not a maker.

He sets up a schema involving a four stage method of criticism - describing, interpreting, evaluating and theorising. It is, again, a useful schema, demarcating four different identifiable aspects of criticism, especially for consumption by undergraduates to whom the word 'criticism' is still used in the non-specialist sense of bad-saying, and all to frequently in the mass media sense of unequivocal, morally outrighteous, bad-saying. Even with this crystalline system he acknowledges the limits of his model - he recognises the interpretation that happens with description and that in writing the two are deeply intertwined and for that I am grateful. It doesn't entirely provide a 'drive-thru' approach to thinking where knowledge and understanding is acquired piecemeal; although his notion of knowledge is overall fashionably indistinct from an upscaled idea of information.

The photographs he chooses often predictably - and from a beginning student's perspective, usefully - from the canon of photographs its ok to criticise. Cindy Sherman is thrown into the foray, along with Barbara Kruger, Mary Ellen Mark is in there, and so on. They are all identifiably photographs to write about. They are good to write about because they are images that require strong contextualisation within recognised theories of criticism, in fact they are all images that demand strong theory in order for them to admit sophisticated meaning. Other photographers such as Jerry Uelsmann, Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe typically lean to particular avenues of criticism, which is useful although not particularly interesting to someone who is looking for more engaging writing.

Terry Barrett has created a humble and, as its now in its third edition, proven book which is undoubtably needed and will serve beginners well and without pretention or patronisation and remind others of the difficulties that present themselves when trying to understand something as obvious as a photograph.